‘Living in something like financial terror’

Everyone in Amherstburg is talking about it: the town’s unbelievable financial meltdown.

They’re dumbfounded. They’re incensed. And they’re nervous. They’re demanding that their councillors do something. They’re calling for their administrators to be fired.

“Most of us are living in something like financial terror,” resident Marcie Graham told me. “What’s going to happen to our businesses? What’s going to happen to our homes, with taxes? Is it going to be possible to stay here? Are our property values going to plummet because who wants to buy a home that’s being taxed up the wazoo?

I don’t think Amherstburg, a town with plenty of potential, can get itself out of this. And we can’t leave an entire community out on a limb. We can’t wait, like Detroit, until it can’t pay its police or pick up its garbage, until its streetlights go out. Amherstburg needs a provincial supervisor.

Maybe Deputy Mayor Ron Sutherland, who is running for mayor, was doing some campaigning when he requested that the government appoint a supervisor to operate the town. Definitely he should have conferred with council first, though it’s rich irony for iron-fisted Mayor Wayne Hurst to complain that Sutherland isn’t a team player. Whatever. The town needs a supervisor. Period.

The revelations of “unorthodox” and questionable financial practices are incredible. The town took money reserved for one thing and spent it on another; that’s breaking the rules. It charged residents for things they didn’t get. Do taxpayers even know the town’s total debt yet? It has little money; its reserves are depleted. How will it meet its obligations? I suspect even the police investigation isn’t going to close this case, not with what could be years of mismanagement and lack of oversight.

Meanwhile, Hurst has said little. He usually says, if he speaks at all, things like, ‘I can’t comment. I’ll wait until the police report.’

“There’s a process,” he told The Windsor Star’s Doug Schmidt this time. (He doesn’t usually talk to me. People keep asking me, Where is the mayor? I don’t know. Again, he doesn’t generally speak to me.)

Then there’s council. There’s something like a Berlin Wall between the two factions. The crisis isn’t bringing these two sides together. They even sit on opposite sides of the council table.

Finally, there’s CAO Mike Phipps. He says he’s getting to the bottom of this, albeit slowly and torturously, and he has hired “very qualified” staff. But he’s in Florida, again. He’s been gone for more than a week. He’s not coming back until some time in late March (Hurst says March 24. Phipps’ wife says March 31.) You can reach him by email, poolside or maybe in a beach cabana, somewhere in Margaritaville. He’ll miss the council meeting tonight.

This, apparently, is part of his deal. But clearly, this town needs a full-time CAO.

Calling in a provincial supervisor is a big deal, which is why it has happened only once in the last half century, in Moosonee, a tiny, isolated community near James Bay. Minister of Municipal Affairs Linda Jeffrey can’t just appoint a supervisor, like former Education Minister Laurel Broten appointed a supervisor for the Catholic school board in 2012 or Health Minister Deb Matthews appointed a supervisor for Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital in 2011. The Ontario Municipal Board has to rule on it. If there’s opposition, it has to conduct a hearing. There has to be evidence that the municipality can’t raise revenue or pay its debts. And if a supervisor is appointed, it’s at the expense of democracy: the supervisor assumes ultimate control until the town can operate the way it’s supposed to.

“It’s not something taken lightly,” Windsor West MPP Teresa Piruzza, the nearest government member, told me. “There needs to be a level of due diligence. The ministry needs the time.”

But not too much time, I hope. As Coun. Diane Pouget, who asked the ministry about a supervisor last December, said, “desperate times require desperate measures. We can’t keep going on like this.”

There were serious medical errors and a “toxic” environment at Hotel-Dieu Grace when supervisor Ken Deane was appointed. He turned it around. The Catholic school board’s finances were something like Amherstburg’s before a supervisor was appointed. Now the board has a surplus, though other issues remain unresolved, I’m told.

With the town “torn apart,” admitted Phipps by email, only a provincial supervisor, with authority, unfettered by politics, will be able to effect change.

Still, nobody should let this council off the hook. They have to come together and lead – for the seven months left before voters turf a lot of them out.

As the town’s MPP, Taras Natyshak, said, “ultimately, the future of the town is in the balance.”

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